About Last Minute Vegan

My name is Tiffany McCauely. I’ve been a food blogger and cookbook author for over 8 years now. I have three published cookbooks to my name and have been the proud owner of quite a few blogs over the years. The most well known blog being TheGraciousPantry.com.

I started my journey as a blogger with a cookie business! I was selling cookies and knew that this thing called “blogging” was a “free” way to market my business. It didn’t take long for my cookie blog to become more of a business than selling my cookies! So I quit baking to sell and started baking to blog.

It didn’t take me long to figure out that I couldn’t eat all those cookies (I was baking almost every day!) without it having an impact on my weight and my health. I had just newly become a mother and I knew my health was just as important for me as it would be for my son.

So I sold my cookie blog and started on my journey with clean eating. I did that for many years and have grown a nice business and very loyal following there.

Then in 2017, after the death of my mother, I realized I had completely neglected myself while I cared for her and my son. My blood sugars were getting very high and since diabetes runs in my family, I knew I had to act.

The first thing I did was go low carb and for a while, it worked great! I dropped 40 pounds and felt “okay”. But I didn’t feel great. I knew I could feel better.

After months of eating low carb, I started to get pounding heart beats and I was so thirsty I couldn’t see straight. (Low carb diets are a fabulous diuretic!)

I fell off the wagon several times and even started a low carb blog in the hopes of keeping myself on track. It wasn’t easy. And if I’m being totally honest, I missed beans!!

So February of 2018, I was cruising Facebook and ran across an ad for the iThrive documentary.

You see, I had seen all those other documentaries. Forks Over Knives, Food Inc. and a few others. And while it seemed like a great idea to go vegan, I found that my blood sugar shot up super high when I ate that way. So watching this new documentary didn’t feel very hopeful to me. But I watched it anyway.

It was spread out over 9 evenings. The first evening, I wasn’t all that impressed, but I still continued on evening 2. That was the episode that really got me hooked. It’s about a guy who was far down the road of diabetes and had already had a heart attack because of it. He was in bad shape and looking to make dramatic changes in his life.

Something about his story really resonated with me. I had been feeling odd for several months on my low carb diet but I couldn’t put my finger on what that feeling was.

It wasn’t until my first day of eating 100% plant based that I realized my body couldn’t digest all that meat!! After the first day, my gut felt incredibly light and I felt like I was walking on air. I knew it was a feeling I didn’t want to lose, so I kept going. The documentary encouraged me and I also picked up a couple of books that were incredibly helpful. I’ll post those below.

But long story short, I combined a vegan diet with fasting and it’s been a complete life changer!! The fasting has helped me to become more glucose tolerant, and the vegan diet is giving me life once again.

To sum it up, I couldn’t feel alive while I was eating so much death! I know that sounds dramatic, but that’s really how I felt, and still feel now.

I’m still blogging over at The Gracious Pantry, but I no longer post meat based recipes there. I started this blog simply because I wanted to have a place on the web where I could focus solely on promoting a plant based eating plan.

I hope you’ll join me! Tiffany

THE BOOKS I RECOMMEND IF YOU ARE JUST GETTING STARTED:

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